Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what advice he has given to NHS trusts on the cheaper procurement of Avastin to treat cancers.

The Department has not issued advice. We understand that a number of patents for Avastin are due to expire over the next few years and other companies plan to place similar medicines to Avastin on to the market to treat the same conditions. These are called biosimilars. We have made no estimate of the number of people in England who are privately funding use of Avastin for cancer treatment as this data is not collected centrally.